- Zakir Hussain: Re - Turn of the Unholy
- 18 October - 15 November 2008
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition titled ‘Glorious Days’ by artist Zakkir Hussain. The show will run from 18 October to 8 November ’08, at, Vadehra art Gallery, D 178 Okhla Industrial Area, Phase 1, New Delhi.
Zakkir Hussain was born in Kerala and completed his education in art from College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum and the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda.
The large body of works including paintings and drawings are largely rendered in mixed media, conte and watercolour on paper along with a series of serigraphs.
Hussain works are potent with keen observations, and loaded with aptly contextual commentaries on the social, political, economic and geographical trajectories that influence the act of ‘representation’. Each work consists of either a cluster of overlapping images or single ones, drawn with precision and in a unique style. His styles infringe and smudge the margins between the expressional mode of drawing and painting where one can compliment and interplay the other.
“It is not to claim that Zakkir is the first one who has extensively used dry-pastel as a medium of articulation but to mark that his usage of the medium has substantially unsettled the conventional boundaries of paintings and drawings,” comments art historian Santosh. S on Hussain’s works.
One of the significant characters within the art works of Hussain are the disintegrated, unconventional forms through which the represented subject heaves across the pictorial ground. The language remains embedded within the politics of representation while selecting the subject and refraining from objectifying the same.
Hussain traverses through the class, caste specific socio-political temperaments. Colours in their most diverse subsistence show up within the art works, but strangely are never emphasised to an extent, which would distract the viewer from contemplating on the primary motive behind the expression.
In one untitled work a cacophony of images appear showing the intentional heterogeneity that persists in his works.
“His works like Fragments from the Devastated Land are instances of a complex array of images and imageries. The (dis-) placement of pictorial elements and their refusal to and resistance against homogenizing themselves are in fact an outcome of their engagement with the spatiotemporal continuity of variation. The images and imageries in these works are always in the process of becoming something of the other or the other of something,” writes Santhosh.
The works retain a quasi-graffito quality, which is a cultural product of its own. Image and text team up and forms, figures and colours collapse and constellate simultaneously giving into a dialogic idiom. Here the rebated and the repressed counter locates and exchange positions and functions. Stemming out of an essential political consciousness and social concern the works are statements on the beliefs of the artist as an individual existing with the virtues and vices of humanity. The works are introspective and placed within a temporal-space where beliefs are in multitude yet ambiguous, power shifts, but only through horizontal planes of the triangle and individual’s constant denial of the collective and refuge back to later when power apparatus un-alarmingly fail.